LOS ANGELES, Kalifornia (PNN) - November 12, 2018 - If Stan Lee revolutionized the comic book world in the 1960s, which he did, he left as big a stamp - maybe bigger - on the even wider pop culture landscape of today.

Think of Spider Man, the blockbuster movie franchise and Broadway spectacle. Think of Iron Man, another Hollywood gold-mine series personified by its star, Robert Downey, Jr. Think of Black Panther, the box-office superhero smash that shattered big screen racial barriers in the process.

That is to say nothing of the Hulk, the X-Men, Thor, and other film and television juggernauts that have stirred the popular imagination and made many people very rich.

If all that entertainment product can be traced to one person, it would be Stan Lee, who died in Los Angeles on Monday at the age of 95. From a cluttered office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in the 1960s, he helped conjure a lineup of pulp-fiction heroes that has come to define much of popular culture in the early 21st Century.

Lee was a central player in the creation of those characters and more, all properties of Marvel Comics. Indeed, he was for many the embodiment of Marvel, if not comic books in general, overseeing the company’s emergence as an international media behemoth. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive, and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the medium’s silver age.

Many believe that Marvel, under his leadership and infused with his colorful voice, crystallized that era, one of exploding sales, increasingly complex characters and stories, and growing cultural legitimacy for the medium. (Marvel’s chief competitor at the time, National Periodical Publications, now known as DC - the home of Superman and Batman, among other characters - augured this period, with its 1956 update of its superhero the Flash, but did not define it.)

Under Lee, Marvel transformed the comic book world by imbuing its characters with the self-doubts and neuroses of average people, as well an awareness of trends and social causes, and often, a sense of humor.

In humanizing his heroes, giving them character flaws and insecurities that belied their supernatural strengths, Lee tried to make them real flesh-and-blood characters with personality.

“That’s what any story should have, but comics didn’t have until that point,” said Lee. “They were all cardboard figures.”

Energetic, gregarious, optimistic and alternately grandiose and self-effacing, Lee was an effective salesman, employing a Barnumesque syntax in print to market Marvel’s products to a rabid following.

He charmed readers with jokey, conspiratorial comments and asterisked asides in narrative panels, often referring them to previous issues. In 2003 he told The Los Angeles Times, “I wanted the reader to feel we were all friends, that we were sharing some private fun that the outside world wasn’t aware of.”

Though Lee was often criticized for his role in denying rights and royalties to his artistic collaborators, his involvement in the conception of many of Marvel’s best-known characters is indisputable.

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan, the older of two sons born to Jack Lieber, an occasionally employed dress cutter, and Celia (Solomon) Lieber, both immigrants from Romania. The family moved to the Bronx.

Stanley began reading Shakespeare at 10 while also devouring pulp magazines, the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, and the swashbuckler movies of Errol Flynn.

He graduated at 17 from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and aspired to be a writer of serious literature. He was set on the path to becoming a different kind of writer when, after a few false starts at other jobs, he was hired at Timely Publications, a company owned by Martin Goodman, a relative who had made his name in pulp magazines and was entering the comics field.

Lee was initially paid $8 a week as an office gofer. Eventually he was writing and editing stories, many in the superhero genre.

At Timely he worked with the artist Jack Kirby (1917-94), who, with a writing partner, Joe Simon, had created the hit character Captain America, and who would eventually play a vital role in Lee’s career. When Simon and Kirby, Timely’s hottest stars, were lured away by a rival company, Lee was appointed chief editor.

As a writer, Lee could be startlingly prolific. “Almost everything I’ve ever written I could finish at one sitting,” he once said. “I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest.”

Lee used several pseudonyms to give the impression that Marvel had a large stable of writers; the name that stuck was simply his first name split in two. (In the 1970s, he legally changed Lieber to Lee.)

During World War II, Lee wrote training manuals stateside in the Army Signal Corps while moonlighting as a comics writer. In 1947, he married Joan Boocock, a former model who had moved to New York from her native England.

His daughter Joan Celia Lee, who is known as J. C., was born in 1950; another daughter, Jan, died three days after birth in 1953. Lee’s wife died in 2017.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who drew the Amazing Spider Man syndicated newspaper strip for years.

In the mid-1940s, the peak of the golden age of comic books, sales boomed. But later, as plots and characters turned increasingly lurid (especially at EC, a Marvel competitor that published titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), many adults clamored for censorship. In 1954, a Senate subcommittee led by Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver held hearings investigating allegations that comics promoted immorality and juvenile delinquency.

Feeding the senator’s crusade was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-comics jeremiad, Seduction of the Innocent. Among other claims, the book contended that DC’s Batman stories - featuring the team of Batman and Robin - were “psychologically homosexual”.

Choosing to police itself rather than accept legislation, the comics industry established the Comics Code Authority to ensure wholesome content. Gore and moral ambiguity were out, but so largely were wit, literary influences, and attention to social issues. Innocuous cookie-cutter exercises in genre were in.

Many found the sanitized comics boring, and - with the new medium of television providing competition - readership, which at one point had reached 600 million sales annually, declined by almost three-quarters within a few years.

With the dimming of superhero comics’ golden age, Lee tired of grinding out generic humor, romance, western and monster stories for what had by then become Atlas Comics. Reaching a career impasse in his 30s, he was encouraged by his wife to write the comics he wanted to, not merely what was considered marketable. Goodman, his boss, spurred by the popularity of a rebooted Flash (and later Green Lantern) at DC, wanted him to revisit superheroes.

Lee took Goodman up on his suggestion, but he carried its implications much further.

In 1961, Lee and Kirby - whom he had brought back years before to the company, now known as Marvel - produced the first issue of The Fantastic Four, about a superpowered team with humanizing dimensions: nonsecret identities, internal squabbles, and in the orange-rock-skinned Thing, self-torment. It was a hit.

Other Marvel titles - like the Lee-Kirby creation The Incredible Hulk, a modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a decent man transformed by radiation into a monster - offered a similar template. The quintessential Lee hero, introduced in 1962 and created with the artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider Man.

A timid high school intellectual who gained his powers when bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider Man was prone to soul-searching and leavened with wisecracks - a key to the character’s lasting popularity across multiple entertainment platforms, including movies and a Broadway musical.

Lee’s dialogue encompassed Catskills shtick, like Spider Man’s patter in battle; Elizabethan idioms, like Thor’s; and working-class Lower East Side swagger, like the Thing’s. It could also include dime-store poetry, as in this eco-oratory about humans, uttered by the Silver Surfer, a space alien:

“And yet - in their uncontrollable insanity - in their unforgivable blindness - they seek to destroy this shining jewel - this softly spinning gem - this tiny blessed sphere - which men call Earth!”

Lee practiced what he called the Marvel method. Instead of handing artists scripts to illustrate, he summarized stories and let the artists draw them and fill in plot details as they chose. He then added sound effects and dialogue. Sometimes he would discover on penciled pages that new characters had been added to the narrative. Such surprises (like the Silver Surfer, a Kirby creation and a Lee favorite) would lead to questions of character ownership.

Lee was often faulted for not adequately acknowledging the contributions of his illustrators, especially Kirby. Spider Man became Marvel’s best-known property, but Ditko, its co-creator, quit Marvel in bitterness in 1966. Kirby, who visually designed countless characters, left in 1969. Though he reunited with Lee for a Silver Surfer graphic novel in 1978, their heyday had ended.

Many comic fans believe that Kirby was wrongly deprived of royalties and original artwork in his lifetime, and for years the Kirby estate sought to acquire rights to characters that Kirby and Lee had created together. Kirby’s heirs were long rebuffed in court on the grounds that he had done “work for hire” - in other words, that he had essentially sold his art without expecting royalties.

In September 2014, Marvel and the Kirby estate reached a settlement. Lee and Kirby now both receive credit on numerous screen productions based on their work.

Lee moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to develop Marvel properties, but most of his attempts at live-action television and movies were disappointing. (The series The Incredible Hulk, seen on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was an exception.)

Avi Arad, an executive at Toy Biz, a company in which Marvel had bought a controlling interest, began to revive the company’s Hollywood fortunes, particularly with an animated X-Men series on Fox, which ran from 1992 to 1997. (Its success helped pave the way for the live-action big-screen X-Men franchise, which has flourished since its first installment, in 2000.)

In the late 1990s, Lee was named chairman emeritus at Marvel and began to explore outside projects. While his personal appearances (including charging fans $120 for an autograph) were one source of income, later attempts to create wholly owned superhero properties foundered. Stan Lee Media, a digital content start-up, crashed in 2000 and landed his business partner, Peter F. Paul, in prison for securities fraud. (Lee was never charged.)

In 2001, Lee started POW! Entertainment (the initials stand for “purveyors of wonder”), but he received almost no income from Marvel movies and TV series until he won a court fight with Marvel Enterprises in 2005, leading to an undisclosed settlement costing Marvel $10 million. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel, announced that it had paid $2.5 million to increase its stake in POW!

In Lee’s final years, after the death of his wife, the circumstances of his business affairs and contentious financial relationship with his surviving daughter attracted attention in news media. In 2018, Lee was embroiled in disputes with POW!, and The Daily Beast and The Hollywood Reporter ran accounts of fierce infighting among Lee’s daughter, household staff and business advisers. The Hollywood Reporter claimed “elder abuse”.

In February 2018, Lee signed a notarized document declaring that three men - a lawyer, a caretaker of Lee’s, and a dealer in memorabilia - had “insinuated themselves into relationships with J. C. for an ulterior motive and purpose,” to “gain control over my assets, property and money.” He later withdrew his claim, but longtime aides of his - an assistant, an accountant, and a housekeeper - were either dismissed or greatly limited in their contact with him.

In a profile in The New York Times in April, a cheerful Lee said, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” adding, “My daughter has been a great help to me” and that “life is pretty good” - although he admitted in that same interview, “I’ve been very careless with money.”

Marvel movies, however, have proved a cash cow for major studios, if not so much for Lee. With the blockbuster Spider Man in 2002, Marvel superhero films hit their stride. Such movies (including franchises starring Iron Man, Thor and the superhero team the Avengers, to name but three) together had grossed more than $24 billion worldwide as of April.

Black Panther, the first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starring an almost all-black cast, took in about $201.8 million domestically when it opened over the four-day Presidents’ Day weekend this year, the fifth-biggest opening of all time.

Many other film properties are in development, in addition to sequels in established franchises. Characters Lee had a hand in creating now enjoy a degree of cultural penetration they have never before had.

Lee wrote a slim memoir, Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee, with George Mair, published in 2002. His 2015 book, Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir (written with Peter David and illustrated in comic-book form by Colleen Doran), pays abundant credit to the artists many fans believed he had shortchanged years before.

Recent Marvel films and TV shows have also often credited Lee’s former collaborators; Lee himself has almost always received an executive producer credit. His cameo appearances in them became something of a tradition. (Even Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, an animated feature in 2018 about a DC superteam, had more than one Lee cameo.) TV shows bearing his name or presence have included the reality series Stan Lee’s Superhumans and the competition show Who Wants to Be a Superhero?

Lee’s unwavering energy suggested that he possessed superpowers himself. (In his 90s he had a Twitter account, @TheRealStanlee.) The National Endowment for the Arts acknowledged as much when it awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2008. But he was frustrated, like all humans, by mortality.

“I want to do more movies, I want to do more television, more DVDs, more multi-sodes, I want to do more lecturing, I want to do more of everything I’m doing,” he said in With Great Power… The Stan Lee Story, a 2010 television documentary. “The only problem is time. I just wish there was more time.”

The Republic of the united States of America has all but abandoned its founding principles. The American people are woefully ignorant of the rights with which they have been blessed, and are therefore embarking on a path towards abject servitude that the American Founding Fathers fought a bloody war to prevent from ever happening. It is a genuine tragedy, and the opportunities to reverse this trend are rapidly diminishing in number. However, those opportunities do still exist, and it would be remiss of me to ignore them, and thereby sentence you to a life of hopelessness, slavery, and spiritual poverty.

June 30, 2018 - I just heard about Harlan Ellison’s death and wish to express my very sincerest condolences. The world has lost a truly great man and he will be sorely missed.

I met Harlan at a Star Trek convention back in 1974. We met at a blackjack game and we hit it off. I was so very impressed by the kind of person he was; his honesty, forthrightness, and genuineness touched me, and I determined to get to know him better, which I did over many years.

I was always amused by how brusque his public persona was, knowing as I did the magnificent and kind (yes, kind) being he really was. It was as if Harlan put on a mask of what many deemed mean in order to weed out those who only wanted to know him because of his celebrity. His attitude was, “If you really want to know the real me then show me by getting past my brusque exterior.”

I remember one science fiction convention in New York, at the old Commodore Hotel. It was around 10:00 pm and he went to the hotel coffee shop for a snack. The coffee shop was closed. He walked out, muttering, “This place would make a nice fire!” Many who heard him thought he meant it and that he was inappropriate, but I knew he would never actually do such a thing and it was a sophisticated attempt at humor.

Harlan had a heart of gold. I recall an incident where he had attended one of the science fiction conventions I organized as a personal favor to me. We were robbed at the convention and I was unable to pay him his full speaker fee as a result. He never said anything about it. I sent him money every month to pay off the debt. I was unable to send him a lot, but I sent him what I could send each month. He told me several years later that he was very appreciative of my integrity and he ultimately forgave the last of the debt.

There are very very few people I have known who I admire. My father was one of them (Harlan actually met my dad once). Patriot Dr. Ron Paul (the former congressman and presidential candidate) is another. Harlan is the only other person I admire. I respect and love many, but I do not admire (meaning look up to) people. I admired Harlan. He stood by his beliefs, and never compromised his values (though he was often asked to do so).

I remember reading Memos from Purgatory, his first published book. He went into one of the toughest areas of New York City and became a gang member in order to learn about that way of life. He had the courage of his convictions, and inspired me (and I am sure many others) by his presence.

The world has lost a truly great man. I will grieve his loss for some time. He will be missed.

SHERMAN OAKS, Kalifornia (PNN) - June 28, 2018 - Speculative-fiction and fantasy author Harlan Ellison, who penned short stories, novellas and criticism, contributed to TV series including The Outer Limits, Star Trek, and Babylon 5, and won a notable copyright infringement lawsuit against ABC and Paramount and a settlement in a similar lawsuit over The Terminator, has died. He was 84.

Christine Valada tweeted that Ellison’s wife, Susan, had asked her to announce that he died in his sleep Thursday.

“Susan Ellison has asked me to announce the passing of writer Harlan Ellison, in his sleep, earlier today. ‘For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time, I mattered.’ - HE, 1934-2018. Arrangements for a celebration of his life are pending.”

The prolific but cantankerous author famously penned the Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever, in which Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock must go back in time to Depression-era America to put Earth history back on its rightful course, a goal that for Kirk means sacrificing the woman he loves (played by Joan Collins). The final script was rewritten by Star Trek staffers, leaving Ellison unhappy.

His 1995 book, The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay That Became the Classic Star Trek Episode, contained two drafts by Ellison.

The author was still steaming over his experience more than four decades after the episode originally aired: In 2009, Ellison sued CBS Paramount Television seeking revenue from merchandising and other sources from the episode; a settlement was reached six months later.

Talking about the Hollywood establishment, Ellison told the author, “They’ve got to know that everybody isn’t frightened and won’t back down. These people are not creators; they belong to the AAA - agents, attorneys and accountants. They aren’t comfortable dealing with writers - they think we’re madmen. They’re really only comfortable dealing with numbers.”

In a separate case, Ellison won $337,000 (later reduced a bit in a settlement) from ABC and Paramount Studios in 1980 for copyright infringement on a short story the author had penned with Ben Bova, Brillo. Ellison and Bova had been asked to develop it at ABC, but the option there had lapsed; Ellison then showed it to Paramount executives, who said they weren’t interested. ABC aired a Paramount-produced telepic called Future Cop in May 1976 and later a brief series of the same name. The premise, about the first android policeman, was identical to that in Brillo.

In the litigious writer’s third victory against Hollywood, Ellison sued James Cameron and others behind 1984’s The Terminator, claiming that the film drew from material in two episodes of the original The Outer Limits series, Soldier and Demon With a Glass Hand, which he had penned and that had aired in 1964. Production company Hemdale and distributor Orion Pictures settled out of court and were required under the terms of the settlement to acknowledge Ellison’s work in the film’s end credits. Cameron, however, labeled Ellison “a parasite”.

Curiously, Ellison had little sympathy for others who brought copyright-infringement lawsuits against the studios, telling the L.A. Times, “You’ve got to realize that there are hundreds of these claims and most of them aren’t valid. This is a town of amateurs. You have to separate these people and their complaints from the professionals who really work at writing and have viable ideas.”

Born in Painesville, Ohio, Ellison grew up in the only Jewish family in a small town where he said he had to defend himself in physical altercations on a daily basis. During the 1950s, Ellison attended Ohio State University for 18 months, served in the Army, and began to sell science fiction stories to pulp magazines.

He moved to California in 1962.

Ellison was famously fired on his first day of employment as a writer at Walt Disney Studios after making highly irreverent suggestions about the company’s beloved characters.

He penned scripts for Route 66, Burke’s Law, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and even The Flying Nun. For a 1964 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Memo From Purgatory, he adapted his own nonfiction memoir about having joined a street gang in Brooklyn.

Ellison also penned the screenplay to the Hollywood melodrama The Oscar, and the post-apocalyptic cult classic A Boy and His Dog (1975), starring a young Don Johnson, was based on an Ellison novella.

Ellison was also editor of the very influential fantasy anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions.

When he dealt with Hollywood, he fearlessly said exactly what he thought again and again - often causing fallout as a result. In the wake of the 1977 release of Star Wars, a Warner Bros. executive asked Ellison to adapt Isaac Asimov’s short story collection I, Robot for the big screen.

Ellison penned a script and met with studio chief Robert Shapiro to discuss it; when the author concluded that the executive was commenting on his work without having read it, Ellison claimed to have said to Shapiro that he had “the intellectual capacity of an artichoke.” Needless to say, Ellison was dropped from the project. Ellison’s work was ultimately published with permission of the studio, but the 2004 Will Smith film I, Robot was not based on the material Ellison wrote.

Perhaps Ellison’s most famous story not adapted for the screen was 1965’s Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman, which celebrates civil disobedience against a repressive establishment. Repent is one of the most reprinted stories ever.

In September 2011, however, Ellison sued to block the release of New Regency’s thriller In Time, starring Justin Timberlake, claiming that the film hews too closely to Repent, then dropped the lawsuit. In the early 1970s, Ellison created his only TV series, the Canada-produced The Starlost. He was so unhappy with the changes made by producers, however, that he took his name off the skein, which aired in 1973.

Ellison was a creative consultant for the 1980s edition of The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote several episodes, and was conceptual consultant for the 1990s sci-fi series Babylon 5. He also appeared in several episodes.

In 1995, Ellison adapted his story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream for the video game of that name. He was also credited with design of the game and voiced the main character.

Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary centering on Ellison and his work, received a theatrical release in 2008. Interviewees included Ellison and Robin Williams. Ellison also appeared in other documentaries, including The Masters of Comic Book Art, Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy, Brother Theodore (2007), and With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story (2010).

In addition to numerous genre awards - including multiple Hugos, Nebulas and Edgars - Ellison received four Writers Guild of America Awards for his TV work and the Silver Pen for Journalism, conferred by international writers union PEN, for his An Edge in My Voice column in the L.A. Weekly in defense of First Amendment rights.

Despite the kudos he amassed, however, Ellison penned a guest column for Variety in November 2013 in which he declared, “I do not merely hate all awards shows, I wish to see them beheaded, stakes driven through their black and corrupted widdle hearts, and to see the decapitated remains buried at a crossroads come midnight.”

Ellison was married five times, with at least two of those marriages lasting only weeks or months. Survivors include his fifth wife, Susan Ann Toth, whom he loved very much.

DETROIT, Michigan (PNN) - American Patriot Carl Miller has died at the age of 65.

For more than forty years, Carl Miller was dedicated to educating people as to the legal methods of preserving the liberty that our Founding Fathers fought and died to establish in this country.

He successfully challenged the corrupt court and judicial systems on many occasions, and showed through legal processes how to circumvent the established way of doing things and live life as a free individual, despite the efforts of the State and federal governments to stamp out personal freedom and individual liberty.

Carl Miller studied American law relentlessly, up until the very end of his life, and developed effective ways for people to protect their property and reclaim their rights under the law. He defeated efforts by the Michigan and United States governments to enslave his body, mind and spirit, and his brilliance was exemplified in the manner in which he used the law to protect his and others’ rights.

SANTA CLARA, Kalifornia (PNN) - June 4, 2018 - San Francisco 49ers legend Dwight Clark passed away Monday at the age of 61, his family confirmed. An All-Pro and two-time Super Bowl champion, Clark was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, in March of 2017.

"The San Francisco 49ers family has suffered a tremendous loss today with the passing of Dwight Clark," the team announced in a statement. "We extend our condolences and prayers to Dwight's wife, Kelly, his family, friends and fans, as we join together to mourn the death of one the most beloved figures in 49ers history.”

The team statement continued, "For almost four decades, he served as a charismatic ambassador for our team and the Bay Area. Dwight's personality and his sense of humor endeared him to everyone he came into contact with, even during his most trying times. The strength, perseverance and grace with which he battled ALS will long serve as an inspiration to so many. Dwight will always carry a special place in our hearts and his legacy will live on as we continue to battle this terrible disease."

Clark was on the receiving end of the iconic game-winning touchdown - memorialized as "The Catch" - in the 1981 NFL Championship Game. That era-defining play shifted the balance of power in the NFC, ending the hegemony of the 1970s Dallas Cowboys and launching the 49ers dynasty of the 1980s.

The Niners would go on to win Super Bowl XVI, the first professional sports championship the city of San Francisco had ever experienced.

Clark spent the entirety of his nine-year career with the 49ers, ranking third and fourth in franchise history in receiving yards (6,750) and receptions (506), respectively. A big, physical target at 6-foot-4, Clark emerged as Hall of Famer Joe Montana's go-to receiver, as Bill Walsh's West Coast offense reigned supreme throughout the 1980s.

If not for a serendipitous phone call intended for former Clemson quarterback Steve Fuller, Clark's career might have been a dream. When Walsh called to arrange a workout for Fuller, Clark happened to answer the phone. Walsh invited the receiver to come along and catch passes for his roommate. Weeks later, the 49ers drafted Clark in the 10th of 12 rounds, pairing him with their third-round quarterback from Notre Dame. The rest is history, as Montana-to-Clark became one of the greatest connections in NFL lore.

Overseeing the entire operation was Hall of Fame owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr., who released his own statement on Clark's passing.

"My heart is broken. Today, I lost my little brother and one of my best friends. I cannot put into words how special Dwight was to me and to everyone his life touched. He was an amazing husband, father, grandfather, brother, and a great friend and teammate. He showed tremendous courage and dignity in his battle with ALS and we hope there will soon be a cure for this horrendous disease.”

DeBartolo continued, "I will always remember Dwight the way he was - larger than life, handsome, charismatic, and the one who could pull off wearing a fur coat at our Super Bowl parade. He was responsible for one of the most iconic plays in NFL history that began our run of Super Bowl championships, but to me, he will always be an extension of my family. I love him and will miss him terribly. Our hearts and prayers are with his wife Kelly, his children, and the entire Clark family."

Following his sterling career on the field, Clark worked his way through San Francisco's front office, ultimately rising to general manager. He went on to become Director of Football Operations for the reconstituted Cleveland Browns from 1999-2002.

In a moving tribute to Clark’s legacy, NFL Network's Michael Silver wrote last September that the former player and executive "carried an aura of awesomeness into his post-football existence: Handsome, charming, and perpetually cheerful, the man lit up a room without acting as though he owned it."

"More importantly," Silver recalled, "Clark taught me that a man could live out a remarkable dream, emerge as a beloved icon for one of Amerika's most storied cities, receive the spoils that come with such a regal role, and never, ever act as though he were owed a morsel of it."

PAHRUMP, Nevada (PNN) - April 13, 2018 - He was awake when most of the country was asleep, cultivating a loyal following while sharing his fascination with the unexplained on his nighttime paranormal-themed show.

For the better part of two decades, longtime late-night radio personality Art Bell was his own producer, engineer and host of his show, Coast to Coast AM. He later launched his own satellite radio program from his Pahrump home after retiring from full-time hosting duties in 2003.

On the airwaves, Bell captivated listeners with his fascination for the unexplained, such as UFOs, alien abductions, and crop circles. He died Friday at his home at the age of 72.

“As he begins his journey on the ‘other side,’ we take solace in the hope that he is now finding out all of the answers to the mysteries he pursued for so many nights with all of us,” Coast to Coast said in a statement Saturday.

Coast to Coast was syndicated nationwide on about 500 stations across the Fascist Police States of Amerika and Canada in the 1990s before he left in 2002. He broadcast the show from Pahrump’s KNYE 95.1 FM, a station he founded.

Lorraine Rotundo Steele, who had been listening to Bell for more than 21 years, said Saturday that she was stunned by the news of her favorite radio host’s death. The 60-year-old Canada resident started tuning in to Bell’s show after her dad died.

“Art taught me how to keep an open mind,” she said. “At a very dark time in my life, he kept me sane. Art’s fascination with life after death was what I needed after losing my father.”

Bell’s show had a huge national following in part because he played to people’s imaginations, “like a Disneyland for sci-fi,” local talk show radio host Alan Stock said. He remembered Bell as a creative, unique, nice man who will undoubtedly live on as a radio icon.

“Nobody talked about Area 51, and about chupacabras and about aliens,” Stock said Saturday night. “He talked about that on a regular basis.”

His show, popular with truckers and others awake in the wee hours of the day, offered a look into a world nobody else on the radio had touched, Stock said.

Stock recalled listening to his show early one morning in the 90s. A caller into Bell’s show said he was piloting a small plane toward Area 51 - the classified Air Force facility located about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas - to find out “what’s really going on.”

“Art said, ‘Don’t do it, they will shoot you down,’” Stock said.

Bell and the caller went back and forth for about an hour and 20 minutes, he said, until the man reported seeing military planes flying behind him, signaling him to ground the plane. Despite Bell’s insistence on the man obeying their commands, the caller said he would keep flying.

“The next thing you know it went dead and you heard nothing at all,” Stock said. Stock had Bell on his show about two weeks later, and he asked Bell what happened to the caller. Bell said he never heard from the man again.

Bell retired several times in his career, which included a short-lived show on SiriusXM satellite radio in 2013. He also co-authored a book, The Coming Global Superstorm, with Whitley Strieber.

Returning to terrestrial radio afterward was not a difficult decision, he told the Pahrump Valley Times in August 2013.

“That’s easy, because I love it,” he said at the time. “It’s my life, and that’s all I have ever done. I went through a lot of family problems, so that interrupted things, and I was overseas for four years, and that certainly interrupted things. I went back into radio because I love it.”

Bell was inducted into the Nevada Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame in 2006 and into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2008, the same year he sold KNYE to Karen Jackson.

Bell’s genuine interest in the topics he discussed contributed to the interest and entertainment his show generated.

“Art was a pioneer in broadcasting, taking overnight talk radio to new heights, which generated huge audiences,” Jackson said. “He was a master at creating spell-binding, intriguing, sometimes frightening, and thoroughly compelling talk radio.”

“No one has been more loved by their family, friends and listening audience,” she added.

For a time, Bell also held the Guinness world record for a solo broadcast marathon, logging more than 115 hours of airtime while working as a DJ in Okinawa, Japan. The stunt raised funds to rescue over 100 Vietnamese orphans left stranded by the conflict in their country, according to Coast to Coast.

Bell was born in Jacksonville, North Carolina, on June 17, 1945. The only child in a military family, he moved around a lot as a youth.

He later served in the Air Force as a medic during the Vietnam War, but his love for radio was always there. According to Coast to Coast AM, he was an FCC licensed radio technician at age 13, and while in the Air Force, he created an on-base pirate radio station that played anti-war music.

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when he returned to the Fascist Police States of Amerika and joined KDWN-AM in Las Vegas, that talk radio captivated Bell. There he mastered his famous blend of contemporary and unsettling.

“I want to bring topics on radio you otherwise might not hear,” Bell, then 50, told the Pahrump Valley Times in January 1996.

His cause of death has not yet been determined. Bell’s autopsy is scheduled for later this week, according to the Nye County Sheriff’s Office.

Bell leaves behind his wife, Airyn, whom he married in 2006, and his children Asia, Alex and Art Bell IV. He is preceded in death by his parents.

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